Quotes About Understanding

Two thousand years ago, a church elder named Peter wrote the recipe for community. "Above all else," he wrote, "hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8). That means when you love a person, you occasionally have to turn a blind eye toward their shortcomings.

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

I don't judge, not even myself.

I have seen myself backward.

And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It's fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear: much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.

Am I the only one who knows? I'll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me - they just imagine they do.

You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you're always involved with strangers.

In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record so they'll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

Make it? Fred echoed. Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your turns. The Latin for 'make' is facere, which also reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for 'to fuck', and I haven't...

Mental illness is not funny.

She'll probably want to, once I show her how; as near as I can make out, most women, even young ones like her, like to cook: it's an instinct.

If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime—we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do.

36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?

Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.

God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever.

It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don't think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.

It is therapeutic to meet these people who have intimidated you. And to discover what they are really like. Then the intimidation goes.

The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

Oh no, she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always

The sane man does not know that everything is possible. In other words, the mentally ill person at one time or another knew too much. And, as a result, so to speak, his head shut down.

to the Bleekmen, we Earthmen may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity, expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all.

No perderemos realmente lo que sentimos, si lo tenemos claramente en el espíritu.

She scrutinized him with a mixture of pleasure and pity; or so he read her expression.

I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.